Monday, December 31, 2018

2018: My Year in Reading



This wasn’t a bumper year for me, even if my count remains slightly above a book a week (56 to be precise). Too many distractions (think Netflix, Prime, Hotstar, Instagram!), too many hours at work, too many vapid books. It means my favourites list for the year is a pretty short one.

In fiction, Russia was a recurring theme. I loved Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow, a joyous book set in decidedly un-joyous times - Russia in the first half of the 20th century. Benioff’s City of Thieves brings alive the Siege of Leningrad with surprising humour and tenderness without making light of the horror. Anthony Marra’s The Tsar of Love and Techno is very David Mitchellesque - cleverly interconnected stories, going back and forth in geography and time, all intensely touching, laced with a humour so very black. 

In non-Russia themed fiction, one of the notables was The Adivasi will not Dance, a set of remarkable short stories of life in the margins in tribal India - essential reading for upper class folks. Another was an old classic, Carson McCuller’s The Ballad of the Sad Cafe and Other Stories - the title story hits you like a sledgehammer and you remain convinced no one can do quiet tragedy like the masters of the American deep south.

Non-fiction had my only two 5 starrers. Jane Hirschfield’s Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World is an incandescently lyrical exposition of how and why poetry works. It’s a keeper for all lovers of poetry. And in the same vein, Kathleen Jamie’s Findings is a gorgeous set of 10 essays - meditations on birds, landscapes, cityscapes, prayer, personal crises. Poetry in prose form, I would call it.

Other non-fiction note-worthies include Olivia Laing’s To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface - part travelogue, part memoir as Laing travels the length of the river Ouse (the one in which Virginia Woolf drowned herself); Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime, a breezy tale of his rags-to-riches story; Theroux’s The Old Patagonian Express, where he remains his curmudgeonly, judgemental self, as entertaining as ever; and last but definitely not the least, Tharoor’s Why I am a Hindu, a book that deeply echoed so much of what I feel about my religion.

And so onto 2019. Maybe this will be the year I finish War and Peace? I can keep hoping...

Tuesday, September 04, 2018

Spiti - Why It Should Be Your Next Adventure








The landscapes. Spiti falls in the rain shadow of the Himalayas. And so, like it’s bigger sister Ladakh, it is part of the desert Himalaya. What that means is, you get to see the Himalayas in a different hue- grey, harsh in a way the greener parts can never be. But those greys and the whites of the snow capped peaks, the deep canyons and gorges, the small whitewashed villages, the crumbling monasteries, all set against the incredible blue of the sky make for landscapes that inspire awe, quite like no other. 
The river Spiti itself. It looks like a wide stream of mercury in most places, the glacial grey glinting in the sunlight. Spitian villages are mostly on its banks, or the banks of its tributaries, and you are invariably following it as you drive around the valley. It’s rarely very wide, but you can feel its power as you gaze awestruck at the gorges and canyons it flows through.
The monasteries. Spiti is Tibetan Buddhist land. And there are an incredible number of monasteries, for such a small population. Most of them are set high up, a number of them are the oldest living monasteries and are crumbling, and each has its own mythology that the monks are happy to tell you about. My favourite was the ancient Tabo one, with beautiful murals on its mud walls that are not going to remain for much longer if the archeological society isn’t going to do something soon. The Kee monastery has a stunning setting and is probably the single most famous image of Spiti. The Dhankar monastery (Dhankar means fort on a hill) stands on a cliff that is eroding. And while it provides some spectacular views, UNESCO declares it endangered. 
The high altitude lakes. We saw 2 of them - the breathtaking Chandratal and the Dhankar lake that required a bit of a hike to get to. These, to be honest, are no comparison in size or beauty to a Pangong Tso in Ladakh, but surrounded by snow-capped mountains, these water bodies still have a magic difficult to ignore. 
The villages and the people. Literally hamlets, with each comprising of little more than a dozen houses, the villages are spread right across the valley. They are some of the highest inhabited ones in the world - Komic is at at 4750 meters and claims to be the highest motorable one in Asia, Hikkim, at 4400 meters has the world’s highest post office. The houses are white washed and they stand out beautifully against stark backgrounds. Given that the valley is cut off from the rest of the world for more than 6 months in the year, the villages house hardy but simple folk, who tend their sheep, cows and yaks and farm the little they can in a really short summer. They welcome you with smiles and happily offer you what little they have. Tourism is gaining ground and home-stays and guest houses are gaining popularity, but it’s going to be a while before these pretty villages become part of the mainstream. 
The night skies. We were pretty unlucky on this front in Spiti- cloudy skies meant little chance to stargaze. But one night in Tabo, we looked up and were mesmerised. I hadn’t ever seen this many stars or the Milky Way. We weren’t adept enough in photography to capture that beauty - but it sure will stay with me in my mind’s eye. 
The inaccessibility. It literally takes 2 days to get to Spiti - the European Alps have easier access. The roads are terrible and crumbly, it takes incredible driving skills to get there, you will have to budget for extra time spent on the roads due to landslides, and god forbid you fall seriously ill - the nearest well equipped hospital is at least 12 hours away. Combine that with altitudes between 3800 and 5000 meters, and you are in a place that is quite untamed from a tourist perspective. But that’s part of the thrill that is Spiti travel. How many beautiful places in the world can you think of that provide this kind of an adventure? 

Our 7 day trip to this wild gorgeousness was rough. As it should be. The altitude meant our day hikes needed to be taken real slow, to take into account the the low levels of oxygen. Everything that the valley needs comes in by trucks through high passes on almost non-existent roads. So the food tends to be simple (though Kaza has some organic restaurants) and was mostly dal rice and Maggi. Hotels were basic, homestays were rudimentary. We were stuck for 12 hours on a mountain road that had been washed away. For a middle aged city dweller, it all tends to come as a bit of a shock. And then you take a look at the incredible beauty around - at the grey, snow capped mountains and the sky that invented blue and the ever-present winding river, the blue sheep and the yaks, the whitewashed villages and the monasteries. And you offer up a prayer of gratitude, and recognize how lucky you are to be there at that time, that place. 












Saturday, March 31, 2018

In Defence of Liberal Hinduism: Tharoor's Why I am a Hindu

The politics of religion forces one to re-evaluate faith. At least, it did for me. You are born a Hindu,
you grow up conditioned in the traditions of the religion, follow the rituals almost unthinkingly. And then
there comes a time when you feel you can’t defend it in the world anymore. Not when you see terrible
things committed in its name, not when you realize the contradictions within it (the caste-ism and
sexism, for example), not when you start to despise at least some of the people who proudly claim it.
Your liberal soul revolts.

Yet you want to defend it. Because there really is so much to love about it. Those rituals, for one - the
ones you cannot do without, the ones that center you - the lighting of the lamp every morning, the
reciting of the shlokas you learnt as a child, the visits to temples where you can almost feel the power
of the idols that have been prayed to, for centuries. And then what about the sheer beauty of the idols
and the architecture? And the joi-de-vivre of the epic stories you grew up hearing? The familiarity of
your favourite gods and goddesses, beings who are almost part of your family?  What about a
philosophy of the religion, one that you know vaguely, but one that makes some sense in this screwed
up world - a philosophy that preaches a universal soul, and looking inward to find oneness with it? Oh,
there really is so much to love about it.

Shashi Tharoor, in his book, Why I am a Hindu tries to reclaim all that, defending Hinduism against the
ones who preach a narrower version, an illiberal one, one that goes by the name of Hindutva. Part of
his book looks at the history and the philosophies and the route to today’s version of the religion.
Reading that part, you want to go back to the basics, re-learn Sanskrit, read the Vedas and the
Puranas and the Upanishads. You want to read Ramakrishna Parahamsa and Swami Vivekanand,
Radhakrishnan and Aurobindo. Because all of them just seem so interesting - as literature and as
philosophy, as reformers and explainers of a religion. You know there are parts that will contradict
each other, that there is a terribly regressive Manusmriti, but that there is also beautiful poetry, hugely
entertaining fables and philosophies for the modern soul. Tharoor does not shy away from the
contradictions - yet his take on them is the weakest part of the book. Because honestly, not even the
erudition of a Tharoor can explain away those.

He then goes on to chronicle the rise of political Hinduism and the Hindutva brigade. You read about
Savarkar and Golwalkar and your heart starts to sink. This is the most painful part of the book, and
you can feel the welling up of despair as you see how much destruction this pair has caused to the
fabric of a religion and a nation. He is soft on Deen Dayal Upadhyay and his Integral Humanism, but
is quite merciless on the others.

The last part is meant to be a call to arms, a totem pole for the liberal Hindu, a refusal to cede ground
to rabidness and the ‘Semitization’ of his religion. Here he is passionate and intense, and the ardour
is inspiring. Deep in your heart, you want to believe that we can do that - that we can reclaim the
vastness of our faith, we can shame those who choose to narrow it to a holy book and a few gods,
that we can prove to enough people our faith is ‘eclectic and non-doctrinaire’ and that it is the perfect
one for a plural society, since it never has to put down another religion to uplift our own. Deep down,
you want to believe we can. Deep down, you are not entirely sure we really can.























































Monday, January 01, 2018

2017: My Year in Reading

59 was this year’s number - slightly above my average of a book a week.

Poetry was a theme. It was probably that kind of a year, where you needed the consolations of verse
to deal with the world. And I actually bought physical books of poetry this year, having decided poems
need the tactility of paper and pen. Mary Oliver was, of course, high up there, as a means of dealing with
the world - American Pastoral, her Pulitzer winner, and her New and Selected Poems, Vol 1,
the best kind of self-help book there is. There was also AK Ramanujan’s classic translations of ancient
Sangam poetry The Interior Landscape - gorgeous, lush love poems; and his translation of medieval
Kannada Bhakti poetry, Speaking of Siva - mystical, obscure sometimes, beautiful always.

Some of my favourite reads this year were non-fiction. Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me
was powerful beyond measure. Svetlana Alexievich’s Second-Hand Time was a very long read; but
it was a heart-breaking one about the collapse of the Soviet Union and its impact on the soul of its
people. Krakauer’s Into Thin Air combined adventure and tragedy into an engrossing tale.
Harari’s Sapiens challenged some fundamental concepts we take for granted, as it took us through
70,000 years of human history. Olivia Laing’s The Trip to Echo Spring explored the intimate connection
between alcoholism and literature, through the lives of Hemnigway, Scott Fitzgerald, Cheever, Carver
and Tennessee Williams. And this year, I finally got to Thoreau’s Walden (long-winded and boring
in parts) and Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (greatly inspirational).

After all that glorious non-fiction, the fiction was a bit of a let down, really. There were the regulars -
Rushdie and Murakami, Le Carre and Strout., Mahfouz and Patchett. - all of whom were wonderful.
But if I had to pick a few that I thoroughly enjoyed, I would start with the long awaited The Ministry of
Utmost Happiness - as dizzyingly dazzling as only Arundhati Roy can make it. Lucia Berlin’s short
stories were a revelation. She writes uncompromisingly about life in the margins, a kind of rawness
that is quite unforgettable. And Tana French was such a discovery - her Dublin Murder Squad mysteries
are marvelous. And to think I have only read three of them and there are so many more out there!

So that, folks, was my 2017 in books. And it’s such a comfort to know that whatever 2018 may throw
at us, there will always be a little corner where we can retreat into, where we can sit engrossed in
some story that some writer is telling us. That magic is never going to go away. Isn’t that something
to be grateful for?

The Power of the Story

  Victory City by Salman Rushdie It is amazing to see how much of real history finds its way into Rushdie's latest novel Victory City. ...